Has anyone else had this problem or perhaps heard of any known deficiency with ASUS optical drives in regards to DAE ?

I've built a number of computers with ASUS 40x12x48 CDRW's and they all seem to work quite splendidly apart from this one problem. They all seem to have trouble extracting tracks from certain audio CD's properly.

Dont get me wrong, the majority of CD's they handle just fine but with some particular audio CD's (originals, not burnt copies) I get problems (skip, clicks, extraction failures etc). Now this is despite the fact that the CD media appears to be in good codition and is easily readable on several other brand burners that I've tested them with?

When I got back yesterday I gave this drive (ASUS CRW-4012A) a bit of a DAE workout. I grabbed about 15 or 20 audio CD's from my collection and did a CDSpeed99 DAE test on all of them. The result was a perfect score 10/10 for DAE with "accurate stream" also checked as true. So it now seems that the initial few CD's that gave me DAE troubles were not indicative of it's general performance. I'm now reasonably happy that there is no real problem with this drives DAE capabilities.

BTW, here is a cut and paste of a more detailed description of why I was originally concerned about the DAE capabilities of this burner (ASUS CRW-4012A).

Quote:

One of the fist CD's in my collection that I ripped had consistant troubles with this burner but when I tried the CD in other brand drives it worked fine. This initially made me think it was a crap burner but later when I tried other Audio CD's they worked perfectly. So at this point I'm starting to think maybe it's just the one "nemesis" disk and everything is actually ok.

But then yesterday I fitted one of these burners for my next door neighbour. I installed it and then asked for a CD to give it a quick test. Their daughter handed me a music CD that looked in fair condition but when I tried to copy it Nero spat it out with a "seek failure" error. I thought, ok something wrong with that CD give me another. She handed me another and it gave the same problem, now this CD looked in perfect condidtion. So I'm thinking duh, faulty drive and feeling a bit embaressed that I didn't test it first. However I then went and got a few of my own CD's and it read them ok, so now I'm confused, two bad CD's or a bad burner?

I then borrowed her two troublesome CD's took them home and tested in my computer (with same model burner) same deal. In fact it couldn't even play either of these CD's in analog 1x mode without pauses, lockups or skipping! Coincidently I also had another friends computer at home with the same model burner fitted and it was exactly the same, couldn't read either of them! BUT I also had a cheap Samsung DVD/CDRW combo in yet another computer and bingo, it could play/copy/rip both without a hint of a problem. So I guess you can understand why I'm having reservations about the DAE qualities of this model drive!

Well, like i said before, after my most recent bunch of tests I'm now pretty confident that the drive is probably ok on most disks. Actually it's only the one disk in my collection that gives problems. As to why my neighbour's daughters two CD's didn't work I dont know, but who cares, they were only "boy bands" anyway hehe. :).